Luftgekuhlt: It's Porsche For Cool

Younger People Are Discovering Older Porsches, And The Future Looks Chill For All Of Us

- Michael Jordan

THE CARS MATERIALIZE out of the predawn darkness, and the high-pitched whir and clatter of air-cooled engines mark them as Porsches. Here we are in Los Angeles on a Sunday in May as an atypical rain shower is just leaving town, and it’s pretty much like so many other weekend gatherings of Porsches and Porsche people. Of course, there are a couple of notable exceptions to what you might expect. First, the cars are not all perfect. Second, the people are not all old.

Luftgekühlt first came together in 2014 when two friends in L.A. put together a kind of small, invitation-only Cars and Coffee event for their friends, some of them car people and some not. Patrick Long, a professional sports-car racer under contract to Porsche Motorsport North America, and Howie Idelson, a freelance creative director who specializes in experiential marketing, just figured it would be kind of fun—a combination of Porsche enthusiasm and L.A. hipster coolness. After three years, their circle of friends is unexpectedly still growing, and a couple thousand of them will pay $20 each to see 250 of the most interesting Porsches anywhere at Luftgekühlt 4.

Like any car event, a secret handshake is required to belong to this club, and the shared enthusiasm here is air-cooled Porsches, hence the literal German word for air-cooled: Luftgekühlt. This definition stretches over the first 356 built in 1948 inside an old sawmill in Gmünd, Austria, and continues all the way to the last 993-generation 911, which came off the assembly line in 1998 in Stuttgart, Germany.